Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) is one of the busiest Foundation Trusts in the UK, with around 900,000 patient contacts every year.

Challenge

GSTT needs an interpreting partner that can provide expertise in 80 languages (and counting), with over 1,000 interpreters required each month, many within hours of booking. As a public service, it is also paramount that the solution provides value for money and cost savings where possible.

The trust also needed an easy-to-use online booking system to streamline the booking process, obtain real-time status updates on existing bookings and centralise information for management reporting purposes.

Solution

Language Connect was awarded the contract for both face-to-face interpreting and translation services after successfully demonstrating an unrivalled local capability accompanied by an innovative technology solution to support the Trust’s specific requirements in full.

Within a 4-week handover period, Language Connect’s contract management team worked closely with the Trust to migrate over 400 bookings received by the previous supplier with no loss of information or service standards. Our interpreting team also initiated a large-scale recruitment programme which expanded a local pool of healthcare interpreters by more than 100%.

To meet the workflow requirements, we built a bespoke booking system that was pre-configured to support the Trust’s complex organisational structure which is spread across 300 wards, departments and clinics. The system was rolled out before the contract launch to ensure adequate time for training the Trust’s staff and setting up reporting features to synchronise with internal requirements.